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In my family, anybody who attempts to put on airs or to make an unseemly demand is greeted with a variation on a Mike Myers line from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

“Well, I want a toilet made out of solid gold, but it’s just not in the cards, is it, love?”

There’s a similar riposte, using a Rodney Dangerfield snapper from Caddyshack, to any Howell caught wearing amusing headgear.

“Anybody who wears a hat like that ought to get a free bowl of soup — it looks good on you, though!”

The exchange usually results in mutual laughter, depending on the mood of the one being mocked. And I’m pleased, relieved even, to discover that our juvenile sense of hilarity and love of dopey movies is actually the sign of high intelligence, rather than knuckle-dragging stupidity.

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Britain’s The Independent newspaper reported last week on a scholarly study published in the journal Poetics under this very serious title: “Enjoying Trash films: Underlying Features, Viewing Stances, and Experiential Response Dimensions.”

Study co-author Keyvan Sarkhosh, post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, wrote that although it may seem paradoxical for someone to voluntarily and happily watch a bad movie, it’s actually a sign of a bright mind at work.

“To such viewers, trash films appear as an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare,” Sarkhosh wrote.

“We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores.’ Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture.”

“Cultural omnivores” sounds much better than “trash hounds,” doesn’t it? I’m surprised this story didn’t get broader currency, but that’s likely because it was swamped by the critical bloodletting for Suicide Squad, the supervillain adventure currently topping the box office.

I was among the few critics who actually had something good to say about the DC Comics movie — great characters, dumb story, 21/2 stars out of 4 — which overall received a 26 per cent “rotten” rating on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate chart, one notch lower than the 27 per cent given to DC’s Batman v Superman earlier this year.

Most critics were of the same mindset as Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, who called Suicide Squad “ugly trash” and warned it “amounts to an all-out attack on the whole idea of entertainment.”

Others piled on with variations of the “worst movie ever” epithet. I wonder if they’ve seen Movie 43, the 2013 anthology comedy featuring a shameful array of slumming talent in a series of disgusting sketches. If I could have given it less than the zero stars I righteously awarded it, I would have.

Suicide Squad is a far better film — I actually enjoyed it, in a cultural omnivore kind of way — yet it seems to have broken wider the perceived divide between critics and regular moviegoers. There was a brief online flurry, under the hashtag #CrushtheTomato, of Suicide Squad fans who wanted Rotten Tomatoes shut down, a classic case of shooting the messenger. (Rotten Tomatoes actually has a relatively low bar: at least 60 per cent of critics have to like a film for it to get “fresh” status.)

There were also a large number of news reports crowing about how Suicide Squad broke the August record with its $134-million (U.S.) opening weekend take at the North America box office. The public came out for it, despite what all those nasty critics said! Hah-hah!

The same thing happened last spring with Batman v Superman, a movie I hated, despite being a cultural omnivore. And I predict the same thing will occur with the second-weekend take for Suicide Squad, which will be at least 60 per cent lower than its debut, again like Batman v Superman.

Same as it ever was, and always coming down to personal preference and not some kind of pop-cult earthquake.

Just like that hat you’re wearing, which I hate. It looks good on you, though!

Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column runs Fridays.

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